How push notifications are radically changing the way the healthcare sector operates

They might be simple and not really new, but notifying patients and clinicians can help save money and lives.

Push notifications are mostly associated with smartphones – the ability for an application to alert the smartphone user about some sort of engagement, whether it be a text, a WhatsApp message, a credit card charge, or an e-mail.

But while these notifications are useful for everyday communication between friends and family, there are use cases which are far more significant in healthcare that could bring huge benefits to patients.

The ability to automatically notify clinicians about a patient’s condition is of far more significance than text reminders, and this concept has recently been taken into other healthcare settings.

For example, the myCareCentric initiative is a project using the wearable device Microsoft Band and machine learning in a bid to help people with epilepsy monitor their condition better. It has been developed by a private-public consortium called the Epilepsy Care Alliance (ECA) whose members include Graphnet, the University of Kent, Poole Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Shearwater Systems.

The centre has looked at using the Band to distinguish seizures, and then using machine learning to monitor the data. The idea is to help individual identify when they are at increased risk of seizures, as well as the ability for the centre to contact people when they’ve had a seizure.

For Bryant, who was the former director of digital at the NHS, this use case, which is currently live but also being developed further, is an example of the way technology needs to be used in the healthcare industry.

“We have to build technology that makes the life of the clinician easier, and that adds value to the patient and clinician because historically we haven’t done that; we’ve built it to meet functional, bureaucratic needs,” she says.

But she adds that it’s impossible to make a generic technology to cover all bases, instead there has to be a focus on each condition separately.

“The technology that works for epilepsy will not be the same for a different condition, you have to adapt the condition for the specific use case and that’s important,” she states.

Other use cases Bryant envisages include helping those with mental illnesses or the elderly by pushing out notifications to their specific healthcare support worker.

“So if someone has a mental health illness and they are on a crisis plan and they have a psychiatrist, and they turn up to A&E on Saturday night having a crisis – it would be great if someone could let the psychologist know that they’ve just turned up at A&E.

“Some elderly people get health visitors every day to help them; if they’ve gone to A&E and they’re not home, it saves the health visitor the journey if they can be notified in some way,” says Bryant.

Push notifications could essentially save money and more importantly, lives.

Ecosystem and barriers

Bryant believes that the healthcare industry is open for small businesses and small wearables companies to get involved, as well as the bigger tech companies.

“We quite like the idea of working with an ecosystem of small companies to get integrated into the system and into our products around wearables,” she says, adding that Microsoft isn’t the only big tech company Graphnet is working with.

But the technology itself isn’t where the issues lie. Dr. Lucinda Scharff, information lead at Forward Health, another company aiming to make communication easier between healthcare professionals, states that one of the biggest regulatory problems the NHS and anyone producing software for the NHS faces is that while push notifications and similar technologies are not new, they’re new to the NHS.

“This means there has been no precedent for how to manage and regulate them. Working in a high stakes environment, those in decision making positions and often clinical staff are naturally risk averse and unwilling to be the first to take a risk with something new,” she says.

However, there are organisations that she has met that are open to using new technology as long as the appropriate steps have been taken to safeguard patients and their security.

But even then, other areas can let healthcare organisations down – even things as simple as connectivity.

“Hospitals are often mobile data black holes and in some cases front line staff do not have access to free or secure Wi-Fi,” she says.

On top of this, organisations have to take into account the cultural impact – and potential resistance from some staff – of using the technology, as well as the obstacle of making it acceptable to staff and patients to use a mobile device in a clinical environment.

But there’s no doubt that these hurdles will all be overcome by the NHS and the wider healthcare industry as the benefits to patients and clinicians are too big to miss out on.

About the author

Sooraj Shah

Sooraj Shah is a journalist, editor and copywriter specialising in B2B technology with strong contacts in the IT and technology industry. He is currently contributing editor for New Statesman Tech and Contributor for Forbes. As a freelance journalist he has written for publications including The Guardian, Computer Weekly, Diginomica, CIO UK, The Register, Computing, Infosecurity Magazine, SC Magazine UK, Mobile Europe, Hot Topics and IT Pro.

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